Ross Video’s Voyager takes CCTV viewers to the moon’s surface

China Media Group has employed Vídeos de Ross Voyager to recreate the lunar surface in a 4K mixed reality setting. The environment has been used by CCTV.

China’s national broadcaster CCTV pushed an innovative documentary series called Mission to The Moon in 2019, which coincided with one of China’s lunar exploration missions. For this project, the broadcaster created the first 4K UHD immersive mixed reality (IMR) 4K UHD production environment for television.

The success of this format led it to plan a second season. China Media Group (CMG) again turned to Vídeo Ross to help create a lunar space environment that would provide the audience with an immersive viewing experience. Once the audiovisual content and visual effects were defined with Viajante (based on Jogos épicos' Motor irreal), CMG “bootstrapped” the graphics engine from its new mixed reality studio, ready to produce real-time digital visual effects in 4K format. CMG’s new facilities were also used to further develop the astronaut character, who guides the audience through the environment.

New collaborations with Ross Video

Wang Zijian, CMG’s senior engineer and director of packaging technology for Mission to the Moon, explained why he chose to work with Ross Video again: “We chose to work with Ross Video again because Ross has a much more comprehensive product and solution portfolio than other manufacturers. The company has an extremely mature range of 12G SDI solutions but also helped us a great deal with other elements such as IP streaming.”

On the complexity of the second season de Mission to the Moon, he adds, “This second series was a huge endeavour that took over a year to plan and create. It saw us tackle new technologies and work with cutting-edge image capture methods. Highly complex workflows like these depend on expert, reliable technology partners, and we have received invaluable support from the team at Ross. The key to the success of both series one and two has been the combination of strong educational content married with amazing visuals, and Ross solutions have been the backbone of the latter.”

Zijian also took the opportunity to anticipate that CMG, CCTV and Ross Video will continue to collaborate in the future: “Ross has supported us for a number of years with the Chinese New Year Spring Festival Gala – the world’s most widely-viewed TV show – and we also used Extended Reality (XR) technology for the first time last year. We’re very excited to see how XR will develop and how Voyager from Ross will enable us to raise the bar for visual effects even higher as we begin planning our flagship 2022 shows.”